1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a presentation data-generating device, and particularly relates to a presentation data-generating device in which document data to be presented is transformed into presentation data based on transformation data.
The present invention also relates to a method, system, data management device and a machine-readable medium for generating presentation data.
The document data to be presented may be in a format such as extensible markup language (XML), the transformation data may be in a format such as extensible style sheet language (XSL), and, the presentation data may be in a format such as hypertext markup language (HTML).
2. Description of the Related Art
Standard markup language (SGML) standardized by the International Standardization Organization (ISO) is one of the data description languages known in the art. Recently and continuing, extensible markup language (XML) use is becoming greater. XML is a data description language that has been developed based on SGML such that data exchange over the Internet is taken into consideration.
XML makes use of various tags to describe attributes and structures of contained data elements. Further, types and names of the tags can be freely configured if required. Therefore, XML allows describing an extremely wide variety of data. Also, since data is described in a text format, data can be exchanged in a platform-independent manner.
However, generally, information described in XML (hereinafter referred to as “XML data”; similarly, information described in XSL will be referred to as an “XSL data” and information described in HTML will be referred to as an “HTML data”) does not contain style information and therefore, without any transformation, the XML data cannot be presented in a preferred style. Moreover, some of the widely used browsers for presenting information on the Internet are not capable of interpreting the structure of XML data.
Therefore, when XML data is to be presented on a browser, the XML data is transformed in to HTML data that can be understood by the browser. An extensible style sheet language (XSL) is known as a language used for describing data that defines rules for such a transformation.
Thus by transforming the XML data to be presented on a browser into the HTML data by means of an XSL processor and in accordance with the rules defined by the XSL data, the browser can interpret the contents of the data and present the data. Upon transformation, the XML data may be transformed into HTML data having an appropriate data format so as to present the contents of the XML data in a desired format.
However, according to the method of the related art, a single XML data set is transformed into a single HTML data set in accordance with a single XSL data set. Therefore, with such a method of the related art, it is difficult to transform contents of a plurality of HTML data sets into a single HTML data set and present it on the browser.